The St. Louis gateway
Five yards inside two and a half miles
Five rail-yard rows attach to Brooklyn, and they are packed tight. The nearest lies 0.18 miles from the centroid; two of them sit 0.08 miles apart, about 420 feet, under different carriers, meeting at the line between two adjacent places.
Three of the five are operated by the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis, a jointly owned terminal road serving the gateway. Two of those carry the same facility number written two ways and lie 0.12 miles apart — a scan of all 2,459 rail-yard rows found this to be the only such collision in the whole corpus.
Source: city-pages node-list, checked 2026-08-24.
A jointly owned terminal road is a shared front door
That terminal road is what makes this place what it is. The Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis is jointly owned so that several trunk carriers can reach one river crossing without each building their own way in — two of its yards here sit 420 feet apart — and the road traffic follows the same logic: short, dense, repeated trips into a shared gateway.
What actually moves through these yards we could not establish. No source read for this batch names the commodities at any of the five, so nothing on this page rests on a guess about them.
Gateway work is short legs and a lot of waiting. The hour meter is worth finding before you sell.
Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change
So day cabs and flatbeds are the shapes that fit five yards inside two and a half miles, the nearest 0.18 miles out. That is a fact about the Terminal Railroad Association and its neighbours in St. Clair County, not a preference of ours. We buy all of them.
Dump trucks, box trucks, straight trucks, work trucks and pickups are everywhere, Brooklyn included, and are bought on exactly the same terms.
Most of the reasons people sell aren’t happy ones, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.
We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. A missing bumper is fine.
Illinois law
What the state lets a truck carry
Those loads all run under one set of numbers. Illinois statute 625 ILCS 5/15-111 sets 80,000 pounds gross for five or more axles, 20,000 pounds on a single axle and 34,000 pounds on a tandem, with no axle inside that tandem over 20,000 pounds, and a formula for consecutive axle groups that varies with spacing.
Local authorities and cities over 50,000 people may set their own weight limits by ordinance, but the same statute stops them exceeding the state maximums. So an Illinois local limit can only ever be lower than the state figure, never higher — which is worth knowing before you plan a route on the state number alone.
That section carries no seasonal frost provisions and no harvest or agricultural exemptions. That is scoped to that section of the statute and is not a claim that Illinois has no seasonal restriction anywhere, which we did not check.
One more number from the same code decides whether a title gets branded. Under 625 ILCS 5/3-117.1(b)(1) a vehicle is salvage once an insurance company pays a total loss claim on it, with two carve-outs: hail damage alone, where it does not affect operational safety, and any vehicle nine model years of age or older, which the registered owner may keep by agreement with the insurer. That second one is a right to ask rather than something the law does on its own. Subsection (b)(1.1) sets a separate test for self-insured companies — salvage where the repair cost, labour included, would come to more than 70% of what the vehicle was worth undamaged.
Source: Illinois General Assembly, 625 ILCS 5/15-111 and 5/3-117.1. Checked 2026-08-23.
Questions we get asked
- Does it have to run?No. We buy complete trucks. If the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it — but a truck that doesn’t start and is otherwise all there is fine. A missing bumper is fine.
- What about the title?We need a title — unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. If yours is lost, a replacement is an $18 counter transaction. If there has never been one, there is a bonded route.
- Do you come out this far?Yes. Whether you’re alongside the Terminal Railroad yards toward the river or nowhere near it, we come to you. We buy across the surrounding towns, and in Venice, Sauget and East St Louis as well — getting to you is our problem, not yours.
- How do you pay?Cash or electronic payment, at pickup. That is the whole of it.